Category: World Literature

Today’s One-Liner (#96)

I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. –Grushenka to Alyosha,…

Today’s One-Liner (#94)

Things that give you pleasure—When someone you don’t like meets with some misfortune, you’re pleased even though you know this is wicked of you.  –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney

Today’s One-Liner (#86)

I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson

Russian Reflections on Kindness

1. When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the…

Reading “Job”

There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God…

Today’s One-Liner (#81)

“He did a multitude of good deeds as secretly as bad ones are usually done.” Said about Jean Valjean, in Victor Hugo,  Les Misérables, translated by Charles E. Wilbour

Today’s One-Liner (#76)

“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023

Dear Annie and Lindsay

I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…